Canning Pineapple

A good entry into fruit canning is to can your own pineapple. It does not take much time and is one of the easier fruits to can.

A local supermarket had pineapples on sale for 99 cents each. I stopped when I was out running errands the other day. At that price they had a limit of 2. Here are the beauties I picked up.

The hardest part of preparing a pineapple is getting rid of the rind/outer covering. You can cut it off or I found the perfect tool a few years ago. I can a lot of pineapples and this is my second one of these tools. I broke my first one after about 5 years of use.

It cuts out the middle of the pineapple leaving the skin and core behind. It does limit you if you are canning the pineapple into only canning chunks or rings. If you want to can spears you will need to cut off the outer covering with a knife.

I freeze the core middles. I have a juice extractor and once I have a supply of the cores I place them into the extractor and use the juice to make pineapple jelly. I will also save one of the halves of the pineapple skin to make a fancy salad boat.

After cutting the pineapple from the skin I cut it into chucks and pack into a wide mouth pint jar. I make a very light sugar syrup to cover the pineapple in the jar. I have even made this syrup with honey (but really I found no difference in taste or quality).

Another great thing about canning your own is you can control the amount of sugar in the syrup. Here are just a few of the jars I canned. I ended up with 8 pints from the 2 pineapples I bought. Since I started canning my own pineapple we eat a lot more of this sweet fruit.